Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
This is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)
It gets worse.
Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: “ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”
Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.
So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.
And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?
literally nothing and i genuinely mean absolutely nothing in this world quite encompasses corporate detachment from the consumer quite like peggle_2_ode_to_joy.gif
upon its release to the xbox live arcade in 2009, peggle was THE top selling game for two solid weeks. within a month, more than 100,000 players were on the leaderboards. before it got to live arcade, it had been downloaded 50 million times.
and when it released for ios? holy fuck were they DROWNING in money. when they took a weekend to put the game on sale for a dollar, down from five, a couple months after release, they made as much in that one weekend as they did since its release. it was among the top paid apps for weeks.
with critics, peggle was among some of the top downloadable, mobile, and general best games of all time at the time of its release, and it only shot up in popularity as they made it more accessible to more people. and this was in a time before candy crush.
the thing about simple addictive puzzle games is that they make you feel competent, confident, smart, and cool for being good at them. not everybody can learn how to aim in a shooter or the best strategy in an rpg. but anybodys grandmother or baby brother can play a simple puzzle game, and the nature of these games and the way they make you feel only makes you want to play more and more.
however very very fucking few people who play simple puzzle games that you can master on the toilet would be going to E3 in the early 2010s. remember in 2012 when every ~hardcore gamer~ would screech about ‘fake gamers’ who only play candy crush? thats what peggle was. it was THE crack mobile game from the pre-candycrush era.
no one who was excited about peggle was going to E3. the hundreds of thousands of people who played peggle were not the type of people who would consider going to (or even giving a shit about) E3.
but it sold like hot cakes, and candy crush was churning out content like a madman, and EA owned popcap now, so because the game sold amazingly, and because they wanted to keep cashing in on it, and because corporate drones who controlled the scripts didnt comprehend that their consumerbase isnt one homogenous mass, they de ided to announce peggle 2 at E3 2013.
but not just “oh by the way peggle 2”, no. peggle two sold like skyrim, it sold like black ops, clearly they should be saving the best for last, they should announce it like it was the craziest most incredible announcement of the night!
thus:
but in all honesty it doesnt quite have the same impact without hearing ode to joy overtop of the deafening silence of the crowd. so heres a link too. timeless.
Cringe is dead is also for fictionkin/otherkin, self shippers, “mary sue” OCs, people who use xD, adhd + autistic people, and ace people (looking at y'all, exclusionists), not just for you to use to play Minecraft (it’s a heavily popular game, guys, seriously)
listen… i know this might be a hard concept to grasp but… maybe YOU are the racist these posts are talking about…
like… read the posts. are all your ships white gay dudes? are the people in your art all white? have you written fanfiction about a person of color? do you draw dark skinned people? have you ever drawn someone south asian? do you use aave to show you’re angry? is your black OC a sassy stereotype? do you post about wanting to live in a castle with your (white) vampire husband and his servants and not see a problem with it? or do you support cottegecore? do you only listen to white artists? are all your favorite actors white? can you even name a single middle eastern celebrity? do you refer to all modesty coverings as “hijabs?” do you pour hours of research into your favorite media and characters and yet don’t do the same for real life people and cultures, and instead inaccurately represent them? do you write about poc hoping you can get by on what knowledge you’ve managed to pick up here and there? do you read the links in the posts you reblog? do you use ambiguous race people for your poc edits instead of finding someone of that ethnicity? do you whitewash? does your favorite media contain racist caricatures? are you even critical of your favorite media? have you donated or do you just reblog for appearance? have you donated more to fanfiction sites than to gofundme’s? do you still support companies and brands after they’re outed as racist? is your activism performative? these are all questions you should ask yourself and i’m just reiterating points made in countless posts.
This all reminds me of a man I came across many years ago- A blogger, I believe-who called upon his audience to wake him from his slumber to adjust some frozen delicacy in the oven. but when the call came, he ignored it, and let his sticks char in the unforgiving heat…. Tell me, Will….. when your call comes, will you leap to action? Or will you let yourself burn?
☆crane / trans guy / 25☆
☆fae/he☆
☆header from mister jewel box☆
☆unless i tag otherwise, all of the posts i make are ok to reblog☆
☆bg by zazozaliad, flag by me (demisexual 2.0)☆
